Thursday, December 12, 2013

Self-Education via Libraries

The self-made person is a popular conceit of the American mythos, along with pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.  In association with this, one sometimes runs into the idea that education is unnecessary, given enough libraries and internet one can educate oneself.

Education solely via the internet is questionable because searching for information is a skill, and parsing out information that is credible and meaningful out of the web of a million lies (/cite{Vernor Vinge}) is also a skill.  Not to mention that you need some idea of the subject you are searching for in order to know the words to even start.  Not that having the internet is a bad thing, quite the contrary.  But having a teacher, even if one's teacher is an underinformed bigot, is going to give one the words with which to become better educated.  Just starting at a search engine with no words to enter and no idea of existing websites would be close to impossible. 

Education via libraries can be possible, I suppose, but it would be really hard.  Even Madam Marie "Radium Woman" Curie says in her autobiography that studying only from books without guidance is really hard. This from Radium Woman.  She goes out at night in the light of her own body to destroy supervillains with her righteous bone-melting rays of accurate diagnosis.

I bring this up because the local college in this hamlet recently screened Girl Rising, which I attended.  The film is a tearjerker about the struggles of girls in the developing world to get an education without being forced into child marriages, slavery, or rape.  I highly recommend it, though I would have liked it to end with a brief segment on the girls in the U.S.A who are denied upper education by their culture and entered into child marriages, since it is always good to remember that such atrocities don't just happen to other people in other places.  Anyway, the point of this is that during the Q&A session after the screening, someone asked "what about libraries, couldn't the girls get an education at a library?"

Umm, well, maybe.  Assuming an underprivileged girl is 1) literate.  2) Has access to a reasonable library that contains appropriate books in a language she can read. And 3) Has more self-discipline than most adults.

Prerequisite #1, literacy, should obviously indicate a need for some actual non-independant education.  I disapprove of the CIA, but they do have an awesome factbook online, part of which includes estimates of world literacy rates by nation and gender.  I have friends who teach at a primary school in Tanzania, and lament the number of kids, not just in form 1 or 2, who seriously cannot read.  This cannot be fixed by a library.

Prerequisite #2, access to a reasonable library, is a little variable.  If there is a library, it may or may not be in use, since maintaining a library in a useful form is a non-trivial amount of work.  If there is a library and it is decently maintained, it may or may not have appropriate books. By appropriate I mean books that are actually in a language the patrons can understand.  There are a lot of languages in the world for which there is a limited or nonexistent literary tradition.  In Tanzania, a lot of volunteers like to do library projects.  U.S. citizens are more than happy to donate books to the developing world, but what this means in practice is that Tanzanian libraries will have collections that include something like five copies of War and Peace, all in English.  This was good for me, since one of my Tanzanian projects was to read all the great classics of Russian literature, but useless for people who only nominally speak English.  This is not to say that libraries can't be made to work, I have friends who would get together a committee of students to pick what books they wanted for the library, and that works a lot better for getting a collection of actually useful books.  But as far as education goes, it's still hard, even in the U.S. to find in a library up-to-date textbooks.  Classic literature doesn't really change that much, assuming zombie Shakespeare isn't holed up with a word processor somewhere, but science does.  Old textbooks are outdated, and current science textbooks are massively expensive.  This is partially because textbook publishing is a corrupt industry, but the fact remains that getting access to good and recent educational textbooks via a library is not that likely.

But let's assume that all things are great.  There is a well-maintained library, accessible to a schoolchild.  The library even includes recent textbooks written in the child's native language!  What then?  Libraries are big.  Where do you start?  How do you know what course of self-study is best?  How, by yourself, do you have the motivation to really study without any sort of indicator of progress or outlet to practice learning?  You cannot learn science and math without doing science and math.  I know I probably wouldn't have the motivation for this, so all glory to those who do.

A library is better than nothing, absolutely.  But it is only part of a full education, not a replacement for the same.  Except for maybe a few exceptional individuals with ideal libraries, and most people aren't that and don't have that.    

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